


Voyage

by Wecanhaveallthree



Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-12 23:14:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28893501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wecanhaveallthree/pseuds/Wecanhaveallthree
Summary: Sail safely, swindler.
Kudos: 9





	Voyage

There is nothing in the _Forward Action’s_ belly. She growls with hunger, her engines churning on grit and dregs in the last hours before she begins to devour herself. Her course has been leashed to a dwarf sun, an almost pitiable thing, whose own desperate gravitational hunger has drawn the struggling voidship in.

It’s an eat or be eaten universe. The warrior clad in cerulean power armour can’t bring himself to hate it, even as his trembling fingers break helm-seals and his gene-enhanced lungs begin their struggle to process air stripped off nearly every useable molecule.

He might need the armour’s oxygen reserves later, is his theoretical reasoning.

The practical is that he wants to look his enemy in the eyes.

This is no place for a warrior of Ultramar’s line to die, but it is in every respect appropriate. A tertiary docking umbilical, a failsafe kept under the _Forward Action’s_ skin, serving as part of the vessel’s superstructure. Not a glorious last stand on the bridge, defending the mortal crew and his entombed brother. Not holding a key chokepoint on the voidship’s arterial thoroughfares.

Out here on the very fringe, crippled by an impossibly unlucky encounter with a lone opponent. It’s a joke. The last laugh in that game of celestial poker, the universe throwing down a full house and raking in the last of his chips.

The hard silver of the walls is marred by mass-reactive impact craters of stray bolter shells. A section further down - where a krak grenade had gone off - is shrilling for a tech-priest.

It cries like a human infant.

He presses a careful gauntlet to his brow, the pressure against his skull in response to the pounding recollection from the other side.

The nursery on Kuln Four. Too late, as always, to stop the inhumanity of traitors as they slapped scrap-code inloaders to crucial terminals. Turning the careful atmospheric balance of thousands of environmental cradles into a mixture of acid and chlorine. He’d killed those responsible, but what did it matter? They had already stolen the colony’s future.

That was the Imperium’s eternal lot. An endless tilling of dead soil, planting brittle and twisted crops. Whenever they found success, against all the infinite odds, the universe would stamp it down.

Humans would be killing humans until the last two were left, knife-to-knife in the atomic ruins of civilisation. A species that breeds its own destruction, over and over.

How wearying.

The dismembered Space Marine had struggled to the far wall and was still spitting a stream of invective, the effect somewhat diminished by his broken nose, loss of legs and the amount of thick, tar-like blood oozing from a gut-wound so foul and jagged it could only have been caused by a chainsword.

“...your Corpse-Emperor will piss on your sacrifice,” he was ranting, “Nothing of what your warband has done will matter, you will die alone and forgotten, considered the basest heretics by all those you sought to spare!”

A ragged, broken breath and the wound bubbled with froth like a secondary mouth. It was almost a shame: the dying Marine wore better plate than his killer, glossy black with the eight-pointed star of Chaos on one pauldron, the highlights and finery etched in brassy gold. The Black Legion might be one of the Imperium’s gravest threats, but they certainly had fine armour-smiths.

“Are you done?” the cerulean warrior asked as his foe began to draw breath for another tirade.

A shocked pause. Then: “Yes.”

“Good. Die quietly. I’m too tired to come over there.”

By the Emperor, he was. If there was nothing else to be said, if one knew nothing about the warrior’s psychological exhaustion, this was the truest sign of all: a Space Marine who couldn’t muster the effort to put an end to his traitorous kin.

A clank and the flex of ceramite. The traitor had pushed himself back up on one elbow. “The bleeding should stop,” he frowned. “Why?”

“There are poisons that affect Larraman cells,” the cerulean warrior replied. “We saw you coming. I had time to prepare.”

“Poison?” An almost incredulous laugh that degenerated into bloody coughing. “You? An Ultramarine?”

The warrior couldn’t help but chuckle, too. It was absurd: they were both going to die here, and hate had lost its lustre in those last moments. There was no reason to maintain any kind of facade in the face of inevitable death. No need to keep secrets.

“Close.” He tapped the helm mag-locked at his thigh, the beaked faceplate scorched and blackened and in dire need of repair. In place of those marks, long ago, had once been a patina of glorious colour. “Rainbow Warriors. Homeworld had a lot of deadly wildlife. We made good use.”

“But… why?”

“Why what?”

The traitor’s face was no longer locked in a rictus of pain and anger. It had seemed almost daemonic when they had fought, but now - now - it appeared almost childlike. A recent adoption of the gene-seed, and a combatant who very well could’ve been something special had he the time to learn and grow.

Such was the cast of fate. Nobody came out unscathed.

“Why are you fighting us?” the traitor asked. “Surely… we would be allies? You are excommunicate traitoris. And you are here-” an effort, and he raised his gauntlet to indicate the near-derelict voidship “-doing what? We thought… you were Ultramarine stragglers, not… renegades.”

_Renegades_. That was the truth of it. Some of the Chapter had gone further than others, but not a one was still welcome in Imperial space. Resupply was hard. Continuing the fight against the endless foes of the Imperium was harder still.

“You could… be respected,” the traitor continued, more urgently now as his life slipped away, “Abaddon… has a plan, and… you could have… a true home.”

A home. That was a tempting offer indeed. They had spent so long in isolation, in these endless, lonely conflicts. Boarding actions in the dark and void, hanging high above gravity wells in the most intimate arena possible. Yes. The idea burned in him.

There was no hate now. The cerulean warrior crossed the sparking deck plates, seeing the light begin to fade from his adversary’s eyes. He dropped into a crouch beside the traitor, servoes complaining.

“We already have one, brother. One we can never return to.”

“Macragge…”

“We fled,” the warrior said, and clasped the dying Marine’s gauntlet in the warrior way. “Always away. But it is still a home. The Primarch still lies in state there, and even if ours is gone, we will always have a grounding there.”

“Guilliman… not…”

He leaned closer to catch the traitor’s final words. There was no artifice possible at the end. All hopes of life were swept away - there was no consideration of a last lie, of a barb. They were brothers. Stolen from their families or grown in captivity, it didn’t matter: they shared blood and knowledge and experience. There was no room for deceit.

“Guilliman… lives…”

A final pulse of two hearts fighting to the very end, a last trickle of lifeblood, and the traitor had gone to meet his dark gods.

The cerulean warrior stood in a daze. His unconscious hands stripped his fallen brother of grenades and ammunition. He resheathed the traitor’s knife at his own hip, discarding a bent and broken blade. The Black Legion had come in a ship of their own. They had come aboard in strength. But strength was not the only power in this universe.

Hope. For the first time in many years, the warrior saw a glimpse of it, half-caught, a reflection in standing water. The coils of that dragon, Hope, sliding across the jungle floor on his homeworld.

Guilliman lived. His wayward sons must return. That was the only consideration now.

For judgement, at their father’s hand.

For hope.

As he resealed his helm and checked the blinking casualty runes - his company, few as it was, still lived - he activated the vox, the signal scrappy and weak but enough, just enough, to reach his embattled brethren as they grimly fought for survival.

An oath of moment.

“Fourth Company, hear me well," he said. "We march for Macragge.”


End file.
